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During
my experience on April 24, 2006, I noticed a brand new display
in the queue area, commemorating Disney's new Narnia
movie franchise.
The
Great Movie Ride
The
Great Movie Ride is located in the large building directly
behind the huge Sorcerer Mickey's hat at the end of the street
when you first enter the park. The hat was added in 2001 for
the 100 Years of Magic Celebration, and returning visitors who
haven't been to this park in several years may be disoriented
by the presence of this new structure which effectively
conceals The Great Movie Ride show building.
Let
me be upfront from the beginning: I’m tired of the queue’s
pre-show, though I still enjoy the ride itself. I know the
films are teasers for the three-dimensional scenes filled with
Audio-Animatronics you see inside, but I’d love to see WDW
revise the screenings so that they evoke the same themes of
the ride, but not the
exact films themselves.
Still,
the idea of the pre-show is a good one. As you step inside the
imposing Grumman’s
Chinese theatre replica (some have commented that it looks so
much better than the real McCoy), you wind—fairly quickly,
I might add—along the queue rails while snippets from a
variety of classic movies play. If you queue up on a crowded
day, you may have to watch the same snippets multiple
times—an annoying
activity to be sure, but dog gone it, the theatre is so cool,
that you wish the cineplexes that proliferate today would
bite the dust to make way for the
grand old theatres of decades past.
Then,
you board “traveling
auditoria” that roll you through all the tableaux from
classic movies. A cast member is your tour guide/driver, and
provides back story to the
scenes you’re witnessing—a good idea, as long as you have
an enthusiastic guide. There is a surprise in the attraction
involving your guide that will be too much of a spoiler if I
describe it here, but pay close attention during scenes from
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
You’ll pass scenes from
Mary Poppins,
Fantasia,
The Wizard of Oz,
Alien
and (the classic) Tarzan.
Other scenes are designed to evoke genres of movies, including
Busby Berkeley musicals, westerns and gangster movies. Disney
issues a word of warning about the intensity of some of the
scenes for children, but I’ve never ridden when children
were upset. However, you’ll need to be the judge of your
child’s tolerance level.
The
attraction ends with yet another exposure to snippets of
films—this time, more “modern”
classics are interspersed. (“Modern” is a relative term
here, since you’ll see very short scenes from Tootsie,
The Ten Commandments,
and Good Morning Viet
Nam, among many, many
others.)
I
think you’ll really enjoy the creativity Disney Imagineers
have brought into the
designs of the various scenes, which do marvelously well at
evoking suspense. The scene from Mary
Poppins (with Julie
Andrews and Dick Van Dyke) is one of my favorites—primarily
because of the ingenuity involved
in making Mary Poppins fly. The
Aliens
scene could stand to have its fright factor heightened a bit;
it seems more hokey than scary.
But
criticism notwithstanding, I think you’ll really enjoy this
attraction, which relies on spectacle and technology rather
than the thrill factor.
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